India comes to Europe

Europe in brief Last week AP wrote that Siemens was to relocate more than 15,000 IT jobs from Europe to India, a story later downplayed by the German company. But India itself is interested in investing in Europe, Copenhagen Capacity reports.

Subramanian Ramadoria, of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) - one of the biggest IT companies in India - told Berlingske Tidende that fears of losing jobs as a result of outsourcing to India are greatly exaggerated. TCS wants to invest in Europe, including Denmark, Ramadoria says. TCS has already tried to take over the Danish SAS IT-Group, which instead went to American CSC.

Poland: Expensive broadband hampers penetration

The Polish Ministry of Infrastructure's objective to increase by 350 per cent the number of broadband Internet users by 2006 is overly optimistic, Warsaw Business Journal warns.

Deputy infrastructure minister Wojciech Halka would like broadband Internet users to number 1.6 million by 2006, up from the current 461,000. But analysts say prices are still too high. There is currently hardly any competition between telecom and cable companies. However, some pundits believe that Poland's meagre 1.2 per cent broadband penetration may increase as a result of joining the European Union.

Greece: Portal for arms deals

Greek firm Epicos announced the launch of a global business-to-business e-marketplace and information hub for military procurements, defence contract offsets and industrial co-operation.

Greek defence contracts often attract allegations of favouritism, massive over-pricing and kickbacks, Athens News reports. By bringing together defence and aerospace prime contractors and their subcontractors, local defence and aerospace industries, service providers or consultants, the trade will become much more transparent. The company is currently active in 28 countries. The objective is to reach more than 40 countries by the end of 2004.

Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) and the University of Karlsruhe in Germany have agreed to jointly establish an International Centre for Advanced Communication Technologies (InterACT).

The focus of InterACT is to support human-to-human interaction across language and cultural barriers, and to do research in pervasive multimodal and multilingual computing environments. One of its goals is to deliver friendlier and more helpful computing services to society. ®